Ends, Means, Laws, chapter 7 (Patreon)

“What the fuck!” The words startled Robins and he moved his foot. Tyce tried to throw himself toward Robins—away from the wires trying to grab him. He screamed as pain seared every nerve. John hurried in, his knife held high. For a second, Tyce thought John was going to kill him, and he wanted it. He wanted to die. Fear flooded his system, but not even the surge of adrenaline could drown out the pain.

Instead John brought the knife down on the wires, severing them. Loss, pain, searing aloneness—it all surged through Tyce before he fell to the floor stomach first, twitching and flailing.

John shouted. “Get the restraints off.”

“Sir!” O’Connor sounded personally offended, but someone unlocked the manacles. It did Tyce no good because his body flailed and twitched out of control. His hand came down on the decking hard enough to make his thumb throb even though the floor was cushioned.

“Who the fuck is in charge here?” John demanded. “Robins?”

Yeah, the asshole played at being a big shot with his underlings, but he was slow to take credit now. After a long silence, he answered. “Pauling said we needed a living connection.”

That opened the floodgate.

“We can’t just float in space until we die.”

“You need to fucking do something...” Followed by the world’s most sarcastic, “sir.”

“Sir, they have a point.”

“He’s a fucking terrorist.”

“Worse, he’s a traitor. If we need to close that circuit, I vote him.”

“Enough. The commander didn’t ask for your opinion.”

Tyce lay on the floor twitching and unable to control his limbs or his voice as a dozen people debated his relative worthlessness. He couldn’t even see beyond a few shadows. Either the probe had damaged the vision center of his brain or his nervous system needed time to recover. He hoped it was the second one. If he was permanently blind, Ama would still take him back, assuming he could escape, but he would be fucking worthless as a captain. 

“Quiet!” John bellowed. “All of you are on report. “Robins, O’Conner, Zeller, you are confined to quarters. If you are seen in the halls, you can and may be shot because you have pissed off enough people.”

An indignant voice squawked, “Sir!”

“Stow it. All three of you are going to prison. Baker, I would order the same for you if you weren’t the only surviving engineer, but one more fuck up, and you will be either confined or dumped in space. For now, get out of my damn sight!” After a silence, John continued. 

“I want you to think about this. We don’t know if that’s a power circuit or a command one. Baker gave us fifty-fifty odds. Which means you just took a fifty percent chance that if this man survived, he would have been in control of the ship. You would have handed the single most powerful weapon humans have ever found to a Ribelian. How long do you think they would have honored the truce if they had a ship like this in orbit? That is what you just risked. You’re going to be lucky if Command lets you out of prison fifty years from now.” 

“Sir, we wouldn’t have—”

John sounded even angrier. “Do not try to justify your actions. You can have your advocate present that information to the court. Eightner, have someone escort these three to the stinkiest quarters you can find.”

There was a small hesitation before someone said, “Yes, sir. And the Ribelian?”

“If history repeats itself, he’s going to be having seizures for at least twelve hours. Have medical report with restraints, but he’s no danger now.”

“Yes, sir.” 

Tyce hoped that John knew the idiot kidnappers had a lot of sympathy in the crew—that’s the only reasonable explanation for how easily they had accessed a sensitive area. John had taken the same classes Tyce had on securing territory, so John would have posted a guard at the access point—the elevator—and the room itself.

Shadows retreated and footsteps faded before John spoke again. “We have a problem.”

Tyce thought John was speaking to him, and he tried to get his vocal cords to work. They wouldn’t. 

“Yes, sir,” someone else answered. “Fear is not a good bedfellow, and Baker has talked to several of them about the reason for your assignment to the Rutherford.”

“I can’t believe the Commander talked to the senior crew about that. It was irresponsible.”

“Yes, sir, but I think he was determined to have people watch you for suspicious behavior.”

John snorted. “If I was going to turn traitor, I would have done it before the fucking war ended.”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t think you were dumb enough to wait until the fight was lost before jumping in on the losers’ side.”

“Why not? This idiot did.” John put a hand on Tyce’s back, but Tyce still had no control over his body. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have pissed himself. 

“Sir?”

John sighed. “At the academy, he argued adamantly that the rebellion had zero chance of success. He wrote papers about it. He made historical parallels. He was unflagging in his belief that the war would be long, but it could only end one way.”

“Then why would he change sides?” John’s buddy sounded confused. God save them all from naive children in possession of heavy firearms. Tyce could list a dozen reasons why someone might change sides and join the losing force. Until his unit had disobeyed his direct orders, had had just never expected to run face-first into one of those circumstances.

John sighed. “Good question. He wouldn’t tell me, but he always was too damn quick to act.”

“Yeah, I saw that when he boarded this damn ship. I thought the commander was insane for following, but it bought us time.”

John’s voice faded. “Hopefully we can do something with it. I understand their desperation, even if trying to shove a prisoner into that slot goes beyond reprehensible.” 

Tyce couldn’t hear more. Clearly the ship was disabled. Unless the Command ship had gotten off a communication blast, that would be a problem. When the Dragon voted to run for this part of space, they’d discussed that the large expanse of black between this part of Earth space and the next inhabitable area was long and silent. If they got in trouble, they knew they would have to save themselves or die. But they’d taken that risk rather than having the adults arrested and their children put in Command homes where they’d be raised to hate their own people.

But a Command ship should have maintained some sort of communication. Depending on where and how many communication relays they’d dropped, they should have gotten word back to Earth. Unless the first volley had damaged communications. The alien ship had taken out the Dragon’s communication dish fairly early, but Tyce had assumed that was because her dishes had been huge, archaic structures that would have caught the attention of any sensors.

A new voice asked. “Is this our patient?”

Tyce tried to answer, tried to get his limbs to move under his own command, but he could only flop on the ground. Hands turned him to face the floor and then someone ran his fingers through Tyce’s hair. Tyce really tried to protest, but he couldn’t control any part of his body. 

“I have two insertion points. Damn it. After what happened to Chief Wu, I made it clear that I would not clear any experiments.”

“Doctor, this was not a sanctioned experiment. This was a group of frightened soldiers acting like idiots.”

Someone scoffed.

“Doctor, this is not an appropriate conversation for this time and place. If you want to dress me down for not controlling my men, you can do it when we don’t have an audience.”

Someone flipped Tyce over so fast that the movement nauseated him and then bright lights cut through to his brain, turning thousands of synapses to fire. “The pupils are slow to react. He is not conscious, so we are as alone as we are likely to be. Sir, you have no right to use a human being as a test subject, and I don’t care what situation we are in.” The doctor might have Tyce’s best interests at heart, but Tyce would pay money to anyone who would take that penlight and shove it up his ass. It was hard to think strategically when his head was threatening to burst into flame and now he couldn’t see at all.

“I assume you know about my history with Lieutenant Robinson.” John’s voice came closer.

“I do.”

“Then you know I wouldn’t hurt him. We were friends for years.”

The doctor didn’t answer immediately. “And for years, you’ve lived under the shadow of his treason. If Lieutenant Robinson could turn traitor, maybe his roommate and best friend could as well. After years of having officers look at you and make those kinds of assumptions, would it really be that hard for you to look the other way while your men got their hands dirty?”

Fuck. Tyce had no idea that John would pay for his decision. On the other hand, Tyce wouldn’t put John’s comfort ahead of the lives of the people he’d sworn to protect. The John he knew wouldn’t have asked that of him.

When John answered, his voice was ice. “The only one making assumptions is you. I have never been passed over for promotion, and it was my profile on Lieutenant Robinson that led Command to post the Rutherford in this part of space. I’m the one who suggested that Robinson would take the long odds and attempt to establish a new base of operations outside Earth space and that the Ribelians would be fanatical enough to follow his idiotic advice.”

“And yet,” the doctor said in a snotty tone, “someone told Commander Cancio to keep a close eye on you. The military structure that you say has promoted and supported you doesn’t actually trust you. Don’t lay some claim on this man’s friendship and expect that I will brush this atrocity under the rug for you. No one deserves to die like this, and I will shoot you myself if you order my staff to remove any barbs that have penetrated his brain.”

“Chief Wu requested that operation.”

“And you didn’t try to convince him otherwise.”

“Jesus Christ, what do you expect from me?” John exploded. “Most of the men think I’m too close to the traitor, and you think I have a grudge against him, but there’s not a soul on this ship that expects me to approach a command situation rationally and logically. Well let me tell you something. Rationally, I had no reason to believe the removal surgery would be any more dangerous than leaving alien tech in Chief Wu’s head. Logically, our late, beloved commander poisoned most of the men in this crew against me. I was the last person who could have convinced Wu of anything. Rationally and logically, I would never use a prisoner as part of an experiment because that is expressly forbidden by regulation. And if I lost my mind and forgot every regulation I ever knew, I wouldn’t put Tyce in there because I couldn’t trust what he might do if that tech gave him control over the ship!” Boots stomped away.

When Tyce had opened fire on his men, he’d known that he would never find forgiveness. Intellectually, he’d known it. But hearing John shout his lack of trust at full volume still made something crack so deep in Tyce’s heart that he couldn’t breathe. Maybe some stupid adolescent part of him had expected John to stand with him, but clearly that was not rational or logical, as John would put it.

And despite the fact that Tyce felt as if he’d been the one betrayed by John’s anger, he regretted that Command had clearly targeted John because of their friendship. John hadn’t deserved that.

A hand patted Tyce’s shoulder. “I do worry about that young man,” the doctor said. “Then again, I worry about all of us out here. Commander Cancio should not have put the sub-commander into this position, not when he was going to get himself killed.” The doctor sighed. “Come on, then. Let’s get you back to med and cleaned up.” He rolled Tyce one way and then the other before Tyce felt the inflatable med stabilizer tighten around him. Considering that the alien barbs had left him paralyzed, he couldn’t get more helpless.

However, as the fabric sides closed in around him, tightening to hold every part of him secure, Tyce’s claustrophobia pressed against his heart. He felt the panic, and still his heart beat on in the same steady pattern. It was as if Tyce was disconnected from himself. 

“Up you go,” the doctor said, and then the unit lifted and Tyce swayed gently as the doctor pulled him down the hall. Tyce had another thought. How many people had the Command ship lost if the doctor was doing the grunt work of retrieving a patient for himself. The Dragon hadn’t lost anyone while boarding the ship, but either the Command ship hadn’t evacuated before weapons fire had breeched the hull or something had gone horribly wrong during their attempt to board.

Even if Tyce had the ability to speak, he suspected no one would give him answers.